Feminist video game hacking

There are very few video games with female heroes because video game publishers don’t support them. So what’s a father like Mike Hoye to do when he wants his three year old daughter to be able to see herself as the hero in The Legend of Zelda? Rewrite the game.

It’s annoying and awkward, to put it mildly, having to do gender-translation on the fly when Maya asks me to read what it says on the screen. You can pick your character’s name, of course - I always stick with Link, being a traditionalist - but all of the dialog insists that Link is a boy, and there’s apparently nothing to be done about it.

Well, there wasn’t anything to be done about it, certainly not anything easy, but as you might imagine I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers.

(via Ars Technica)